Many additional ideas have come to the author’s mind and dozen of great ideas have been proposed by friends and colleagues. These feature requests have not been implemented at the current stage in order to avoid loosing the project’s main focus. Nevertheless some of the ideas prooved to be good and useful and therefore will be documented. If possible, the author will try to add these features (and many more) in the future. Information about freshly released updates and links to downloads will be available at http://www.rinner.st/diploma/!scribble-builds.
###COLLABORATION The idea of a collaborative version of !scribble evolved inspired by http://www.vectorama.org/. Vectorama is a website offering a playground for collaborative drawing. Up to ten users can draw on a shared canvas and chat with each other. The owners of the site offer huge libraries of pre-made vector graphics and an archive presenting snapshots of all drawings. The collaborative version of !scribble could be done in a quite similar manner – a shared canvas for the users, libraries of objects and modules, archiving of all the results, an invitation to all users to upload their own objects and modules and a chat-area. Thanks to recent improvements to Macromedia’s multiuser server (UDP, server-sided scripting, access to the server’s file-system) the implementation should be possible without any additional programming as required of the developers at Vectorama (they programmed their own multiuser-server as a Java-servlet).
###IMPROVEMENTS OF THE USER INTERFACE To make !scribble more usable and productive, several features should be added. The user should be able to change an object after placing it, for instance by exchanging it with another object or manipulating its form and color. To facilitate the building of complex settings, cloning of panels including their settings has to be implemented. Debugging of settings would be much easier if the user could watch values directly in an additional window. Tools to allow rotating, scaling and skewing of objects during edit mode have to be added as well.
###PROGRAMMING BY EXAMPLE LIKE FEATURES By learning more about the ideas of Programming by Example the idea of an own PBE tool evolved. A product combining the stimulus response concept of Pavlov and !scribble’s way of creating complex motion and interactivity could be a new and innovative way of creating interactive multimedia applications. Some basic experiments about stimulus response based programming in Director have been already conducted, but the question of how to combine !scribble with PBE has not been fully answered as of this time.
###STANDALONE-PLAYER One of the main ideas of the project was to create a product which enables designers to create and present their experiments. To make the presentation even easier a standalone player for presentations will be developed. After starting the application it will automatically open a defined setting. Therefore no knowledge about !scribble is needed, and this player could be used, for instance, to send previews of ideas to clients in an easy and secure way.